Posts filed under 'filmmaking'

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

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The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Second Lives: On the Literary Turns of Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog

October 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Iona Tait

. . . the turn to writing illustrates a filmmaker’s search for further exploration of their ideas—a way to keep them alive.

One is used to seeing adaptations from the page to the screen, yet there is a less common phenomenon that seems to operate in the opposite direction: film directors who later go on to explore the realm of letters. In this essay, Iona Tait looks at the works of two notable filmmakers and their written works, tracing the discernible ideas that flow from image to text.

After a life of working with the screen, a particular type of filmmaker has historically turned to writing fiction. Last year, at the age of seventy-nine, Michael Mann published his first novel: a prequel and sequel based on his 1995 film, Heat. Quentin Tarantino announced in 2009 that he would retire from cinema once he had made ten features, to “write novels and write cinema literature, and stuff like that.” Ingmar Bergman wrote an autobiography and three novels in quick succession after he had ostensibly bid farewell to cinema with his 1982 film, Fanny and Alexander. And in 2021, the debut novel of then-seventy-nine-year-old Werner Herzog was published in German—with its English translation following one year later. While some filmmakers have forayed into novelistic ventures earlier in life, a pattern nonetheless seems to emerge, and the latecomers’ attempts are often viewed with suspicion. Similar to Bergman’s confession that he wants to “go down with flag flying high,” Tarantino has been lambasted for displaying the narcissistic urge to not have a “late career”—and this seemingly selfish desire has been set against the more generous, total embrace of cinema endorsed by Martin Scorsese, who had admitted before the release of his twenty-seventh feature that he “want[s] to tell stories, and there’s no more time.” Since writing a book grants the creative agent more autonomy, such endeavors by famed directors might appear at first as nothing but an alternative expression of megalomania. 

The theory of the director as a controlling agent harkens back to the auteur theory. Established by the film theorist André Bazin in 1951, the concept of the auteur filmmaker likened the filmmaker to the author, describing both as being completely in charge of the creative process; in doing so, the theory upheld a hierarchy of the arts in which the written word triumphed. Whilst critics have challenged whether the auteur theory is convincing in light of the creative roles played by cinematographers, producers, editors, and actors, many filmmakers have indeed been characterized, by others as well as themselves, as controlling agents. In a 1983 interview, Bergman admitted he was “authoritarian by nature,” adding that his “democratic qualities aren’t that well developed, due in large part to my profession.” Herzog’s unrelenting vision, often to the detriment of his crew and actors, has been recorded most notoriously in Les Blank’s documentary, Burden of Dreams, on the making of Fitzcarraldo. In addition to dominion, the theory also postulates that the filmmaker can resemble the author in other ways, such as in maintaining a coherent style and theme across their body of work. 

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Asymptote at the Movies: Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

December 9, 2021  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Edwin, Fairuza Hanun, and Lara Norgaard

If I were to visualize the novel’s plot, I would not draw a line, but instead a scatter plot of points [...] Shrapnel from an explosion. . .

Arguably one of the most recognised Indonesian writers in world literature, Eka Kurniawan has earned a global audience—most notably for being the first Indonesian to earn a spot on the Man Booker International longlist with translator Annie Tucker for the sweeping novel, Beauty is A Wound. This August, acclaimed Indonesian director Edwin bagged the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for his adaptation of Eka’s Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (reviewed here). The story follows the young Ajo Kawir, who tries to compensate for his sexual impotence by turning to fighting, subsequently falling in love with the bodyguard Iteung. In this special edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we are honoured to have Edwin discuss his adaptation of Eka’s work with assistant editor Fairuza Hanun and former-Editor-at-Large for Brazil Lara Norgaard in a wide-ranging conversation that considers the role of language in the multicultural archipelago, critiques of masculinity, and how Eka’s famed fragmentation on the page can hold up as it moves onto screen.

Note: the following piece includes discussion of sexual violence.

Fairuza Hanun (FH): Edwin, I’ve been fascinated by your works, especially Aruna & Lidahnya and Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, which have explored numerous topical issues, ranging from—but not limited to—gender, race, sexuality, culture, and identity. However, compared to the gritty action-packed Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, your earlier films retained more “domestic” and bittersweet compositions with a main narrative thread. Eka Kurniawan’s literature is well-known for its meandering plots and fusion of socialist and magical realism, and although Vengeance is one of Kurniawan’s more straightforward works, it still possesses his love for multiple threads. This poses my first questions: what are your thoughts on the process of adapting Kurniawan’s braided narrative into a limited screen time? Were there any challenges in transposing his subtlety and explicitness when approaching the taboos of Indonesian society?

I know quite little about the technicalities of cinematography, but I found the film to be absolutely stunning, every scene evoking emotion—the simultaneous isolation and communalism in a village community—and remaining faithful to the descriptions in the book; the actors did a spectacular job at fleshing out the characters. I noticed that the book’s dry, witty humour remains present throughout the film, as well as some of the vocabulary from KheaKamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) being maintained in the dialogue. This intrigued me, as the effects of dialogue in literature and cinema often differ; for instance, how it is made more “acceptable”, or how it can be ignored, if dialect—i.e. contractions, local diction, etc.—is “smoothed out” in writing, reconstructed into a formal, almost mathematically-structured, rendition. Yet, in film, an accurate depiction of the setting can make such a move jarring something out of place in a village with perhaps limited resources to literature, as it seems the people are still steeped in traditional, often superstitious, interpretations. Language should be an intercultural exchange, and Indonesia is a multicultural, multilingual country; mediums of expression which strive to preserve culture should not promote or normalise the process of lingual centrism. I feel that the widespread use of Indonesian and its normalisation or expectations pose an issue of the slow erasure of local languages which have been cultivated throughout generations, to be replaced by the “central” national language.

In regards to that, what are your thoughts on language in the arts, and the process of adapting a book to a film and vice versa? And what is your opinion or definition of a faithful adaptation?

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Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

July 10, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Clémence Lucchini, Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest literary developments from Taiwan, the US, and Japan!

The disparities of COVID-19’s grip over us is becoming gradually more apparent as certain countries celebrate recovery, while others continue to shelter in place. In Taiwan and Japan, processions are resuming after the interruption, with film festivals and award announcements taking over headlines, while in the US the situation remains somehow at once unpredictable and static. In Taiwan, reportage literature seeks to reset old injustices; in Japan, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize reveals its nominees; and in the US, a beloved literary event is put off for another year. Read our editors’ dispatches from the ground here!

Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Taiwan

The 2020 United Daily News Literary Prize has been awarded to the Malaysia-born Sinophone novelist, Chang Kuei-hsing (張貴興), who has been living in Taiwan for the last four decades. The prestigious award went to the author’s latest novel, 野豬渡河 (Wild Boar Crosses the River) which depicts his hometown in Malaysia, Sarawak—a city occupied by the Japanese in the 1940s. Asymptote has previously featured Chang’s “Siren Song” (translated by Anna Gustafson) in our Winter 2016 issue.

The Taiwanese author notable for his reportage literature, Lan Bozhou (藍博洲), will soon have new book published by Taipei’s INK Publishing in July: 尋找二二八失蹤的宋斐如 (Searching for the Missing Song Feiru in the February 28 Incident ). Consistent with Lan’s previous focus on giving a voice to the victims of Taiwan’s White Terror (1947-1987), this new work again inquires into the difficult question of the whereabouts of Song Feiru, a Taiwanese intellectual and founder of a newspaper criticizing the government in the 1940s. The namesake of the book was kidnapped by the Kuomintang and went missing after the outbreak of the infamous February 28 Incident in 1947.

Although the global situation of COVID-19 has been rapidly evolving with uncertainty, Taiwan has luckily arrived at a relatively safe status, and many local activities are resuming this summer as a result. The island-wide screenings of Xin Qi’s (辛奇, 1924-2010) films from mid-July to late-November, and the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival (with the theme of the beloved Italian director, Federico Fellini) from late-July to mid-August, are among the events leading this trend of recovery in Taipei. Xin Qi was one of the few prolific and prominent Taiwanese-language film directors in the 1960s, whose five cross-genre cinematic works have been digitally restored by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, and will be screened around Taiwan’s theatres, both new and old, during the festival. As for the Golden Horse Classic Film Festival, it is a part of the global tribute to Fellini’s 100th birthday anniversary (“Fellini 100”), and will broadcast twenty-four of the director’s films, most of which are 4K versions, freshly restored.  READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part I)

February 5, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work . . . but this was something survivable.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.

Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?

Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told. READ MORE…

The European Literature Days Festival: Highlights and Reflections

December 24, 2018  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Julia Sherwood

As always, the highlights of the weekend were authors’ readings showcasing a variety of styles and talents.

 In today’s dispatch, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, reports on the high points of the European Literature Days festival, which she attended in Spitz, Austria from November 22-25. This year’s festival, whose theme was “film and literature,” featured many of Europe’s best film directors and screenwriters alongside high-profile novelists and essayists. 

What is the relationship between film and literature? How does narrative work in these two art forms and what is lost or gained when a story is transposed from paper to the screen? These questions were pondered during the tenth European Literature Days festival, amidst the rolling hills on the banks of the Danube shrouded in autumn mists, on the last weekend of November. As in previous years, the weekend was full of discoveries, with the tiny wine-making town of Spitz and venues in the only slightly larger town of Krems attracting some of the most exciting European authors, this time alongside some outstanding filmmakers.

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Robert Menasse and Richard David Precht. Image credit: Sascha Osaka.

Bookended by two high-profile events, the gathering opened with a discussion between Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Menasse and German celebrity philosopher Richard David Precht, moving at breakneck speed from the theory of evolution to a critique of the current education system, sorely challenging the hard-working interpreters. The closing event saw Bulgarian-born writer Ilija Trojanow receive the Austrian Book Trade Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action and make a passionate plea for engaged literature: “As a writer I have to live up to the incredible gift of freedom by writing not about myself but away from myself, towards society.”

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Documenting Translators: The Political Backstage of Translation

October 29, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Denise Kripper

These films make protagonists out of the ultimate supporting actors in history, the translators.

Translators are often represented as mediators, actors in the communication of a text who are subordinate to the author. However, translators have often played crucial roles in politically pivotal moments. Denise Kripper tells us more about these translators, and the films in which their stories feature.

Coming soon this year is Les Traducteurs, directed by Regis Roinsard, a high-profile French thriller inspired by the true story behind the translation of Dan Brown’s novel Inferno. During this process, several international translators were shut away in a bunker in an effort to avoid piracy and illegal editions while aiming to launch the book simultaneously in different languages, all over the world. In real life, the book ended up generating $250 million, but in the action-packed film, “when the first ten pages of the top-secret manuscript appear online, the dream job becomes a nightmare – the thief is one of them and the publisher is ready to do whatever it takes to unmask him – or her” (IMDb).

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What’s New in Translation: July 2018

July 9, 2018  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Sam Carter, Sarah Booker, and Tiffany Tsao

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

For many, summertime offers that rare window of endless, hot days that seem to rule out any sort of physical activity but encourage hours of reading. While these might not be easy beach reads in the traditional sense of online listicles, we are here with a few recommendations of our favorite translations coming out this month! These particular books, from China, France, and Argentina, each explore questions of masculinity, death, and creativity in unexpected ways while also challenging conventional narrative structures. As always, check out the Asymptote Book Club for a specially curated new title each month. 

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Ma Bo’le’s Second Life by Xiao Hong, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt, Open Letter (2018)

Reviewed by Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor

The “second life” in the title of this scintillatingly satirical novel alludes to how we live on in fictions as well as to how fictions sometimes take on a life of their own. Partially published in 1941 simply as Ma Bo’le, Xiao Hong’s late work was in the process of being expanded, but the throat infection and botched operation that cut her life short at age thirty left further planned additions unfinished. Fortunately for English-language readers, though, it’s now been capably, inventively, and gracefully completed by Howard Goldblatt in an exemplary instance of a translation demanding—as do all renderings into another language—that we attend to its twinned dimensions of creativity and craft. Previously the translator of two Xiao Hong novels as well as a quasi-autobiographical work, Goldblatt was undoubtedly the perfect person to carry out what he fittingly calls “our collaboration,” which is the result of “four decades in the wonderful company—figuratively, intellectually, literarily, and emotionally—of Xiao Hong.”

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